Story time...

So for my job I work as an engineer specializing in renewable energy technologies.

A while back I offered a position working on a hydroelectric project near Salekhard in Russia, I am always up for adventure and seeing new parts of the world so of course I accepted. Also inspiring to see Russia attempting to move more away from fossil fuels.

When I got there everyone was very welcoming, though I arrived in winter and it was absolutely freezing, with temperatures around -20C at night.

The project I was working on included 2 hydroelectric stations, one was a dam across a river (name translated as 'River Dam', very imaginative) and the other was a dam across a tidal lake connected to the sea, this lake would fill up at high tide and then the water flowing across the turbines as the lake emptied back out to sea would generate the electricity. This dam translated as 'Seas Dam'.

The 2 sites were situated about 60 miles apart with an office and monitoring station roughly in the middle where I spent the majority of my time.

Due to a lack of funding for renewable energy in Russia compared to fossil fuel development there was literally only me and one other guy running this whole place, apart from occasional construction contractors when necessary. This guy was called Einsov (pronounced een-sov). Luckily for me he spoke pretty good English as my Russian is basically non-existent (though I tried to pick up as much as possible when I was there). We quickly hit it off and became close friends throughout my time there, he would often invite me for dinner with his family and stuff which was nice.

Weirdly, one of the biggest problems we faced with this project was from the local wildlife! When the 'Seas Dam' was constructed, it wasn't known at the time that the lake and the surrounding area was home to large colonies of several species of ducks and geese who would use it to nest and raise their young. Large quantities of waterfowl would often congregate on the dam and the hydroelectric equipment and would clog it up with bird shit and occasionally fall and get trapped in the machinery causing costly shutdowns.

To combat this we installed big speakers and sirens on the dam and we also had a radar scanner in the monitoring station to alert us when a large flock of birds was approaching. When this happened we would blare out klaxons and me and Einsov would don high vis jackets and stand on top of the power station waving large flags and shouting to scare away the birds and deter them from nesting on top. I often joked to Einsov that despite our extensive engineering experience and degrees we have become 'professional duck shunners', we laughed about this often.

Anyway so one afternoon I was chilling in the monitoring station when I heard a bleeping coming from the radar scanner, I looked down and saw a massive black cloud approaching the Seas Dam station, this was it, the mother of all duck swarms, and closing in fast.

Quick as a flash I jumped up, grabbed my hi vis jacket and shouted into my walkie-talkie:

"Seas Dam Einsov, Pro Duck Shun!"